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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Age of Sigmar Thoughts

I had to express my feelings on Age of Sigmar, and they're mostly relief. Maybe I should've just waited for everything to come out and THEN weighed in, rather than obsessively reading Warseer and joining in on all the "End of the World!" speculation. But with rules in hand, I can honestly say that I don't think it's as bad as some people are making it out to be, at least from my perspective.

The biggest relief for me is that my Undead Legions models are in no way invalidated. In retrospect, I think I was probably worried for no reason. Of COURSE GW is still going to be selling all those huge plastic kits we've come to know and love recently. But the fact that with the warscrolls, it looks like just about everything they've ever made still has a place in AoS is a huge relief for me. I recently bought Nagash and the Mortarch kit in a sudden case of "Get it now before it's gone forever," which turns out to be untrue. But GW thrives on this kind of marketing ploy, and I can admit it... they got me. But they're great kits, and I'm very happy that I can still use them should I choose to play AoS. If they're going to a more "limited-time release, and then it disappears" model in the future, then sure, the warscrolls system makes perfect sense. And I really like that GW is making rules available for free. It's a huge departure for them as a company, and quite surprising. And looking at the HUGE new Sigmarine models, on their HUGE bases... it's obvious that GW has been moving in this direction behind the scenes for a while now. Even with the advances in plastic in the past few years, the industry had reached a point of diminishing returns on how much detail you could put into a model. Even if you managed to somehow get more detail into them, it would be so small that you couldn't paint it. Models like the chaos warriors, Forge World Empire command, etc, were practically BURSTING off their bases, to the point where people were forced to put them on slabs of cork just to get them to rank up. I'm okay with GW scaling everything up a bit, and since base sizes no longer matter, I think that's sensible. I'm still REALLY hoping that they finally get around to making horses that are a bit more in-scale with the humans, and really do our equine friends justice. I think the new basing system is a great excuse to do that.

But NO, I'm absolutely NOT rebasing my whole frickin' army, I JUST got 'em all magnetized!

As far as the other aspect goes, the gameplay... I have to admit that looking at the first warscroll, I was actually surprised by how LITTLE had changed. For all the talk about how the game was going to be "vastly simplified" for "little children," we've still got a profile with ten stats, half of which are specific to the weapon, and with a model like Nagash he's got FOUR weapons... for a total of 28 stats in his profile. Uh... this doesn't look in any way "simplified" to me. Keep in mind, I own the rulebooks to no less than FOUR different versions of Warhammer, and I've probably played ten games in my lifetime. I've always been a modeller first and a gamer second, so I am in no way an authority where game mechanics are concerned. But since I usually get about two units painted every two years, and then when I finally get around to playing a game, I've got to learn the rules all over again... I'm not really sweating Age of Sigmar. It's just another rules change, albeit a significant one. I hope that once I've managed to process it, it'll be just like any other new edition of Warhammer, with the sweeping changes to the meta game that everyone has to deal with.

Some of the rumblings I've heard sound pretty neat, though... keep a line of skeletons in front of Nagash to keep him out of combat, and he can fight back through them? Sweet! I still can't help but feel like there is either going to be a HUGE amount of errata coming in the next year, or that some sort of points system is in the works... I just can't imagine how victory points or levelling will make games fair going forward. I hope that GW has done a lot of playtesting behind the scenes and that they know what they're doing. I'm not willing to write them off just yet. We'll see.